"Ancient History"

[Roman Collector]

[sand]

Ha. I read something today, in an article or something, in which someone talked about "the 1900s". As if everything that happened from 1901 to 1999 was all equally old.

[panzerman]

My favorite subject was history/ second geography. I was fascinated learning about all the famous explorers in grade six/ Cortes/ Pizarro/ Cabral/ Magellan/ Columbus/ Diaz...

But my all time fav topic was in grade 11 "ancient history class"

There my favorites were the Persians/ Assyrians/ Chaldeans/ Kassites/ Akkadians. I always wishes the Persians had conquered Athens/ Sparta etc.

But I have to admit the Greeks designed way nicer coins😍

[Finn235]

5 hours ago, sand said:

Ha. I read something today, in an article or something, in which someone talked about "the 1900s". As if everything that happened from 1901 to 1999 was all equally old.

I saw a similar (same?) thing where a college professor shared an email in which an undergrad was writing a research paper and was asking if it was permissible to use a source "from the late 1900s" referring of course to a study published in 1997.

[Nerosmyfavorite68]

I remember that 'ancient history' well.  My high school also didn't have air-conditioning, even in the 1990's.

[ambr0zie]

My experience with ancient history is better than yours. I started school in 1992 (so late 1900s). 

I remember that a few years after (but same historical period, late 1900s) we had a certain teacher for a school subject. She was also teaching in another nearby school. But she had locomotor problems so during winter she could not walk to our school, so we had to go there for the class especially during winter. 10-15 minutes walk to a school with post-apocalyptic look (no, I am not joking). It was that cold in the classroom that we all wore gloves, bonnets and jackets. Think about writing with gloves. 

 

[Broucheion]

Hi All,

Seen on X (nee Twitter).

 

- Broucheion

 

 

[DonnaML]

55 minutes ago, Broucheion said:

Hi All,

Seen on X (nee Twitter).

 

- Broucheion

 

 

I think about that kind of thing a lot. For example, that I was Class of 1976 in college, which is now 48 years ago but doesn't seem that far in the past to me. 48 years before 1976 was 1928 -- peak "Roaring Twenties" -- which seemed incredibly ancient to me at the time, an era of flappers and the transition from silent to sound movies, essentially as "gone" as the Civil War. In fact, in the mid-1970s even the 1950s, and anything before 1960, seemed very long ago to me, with its juvenile delinquent movies and black and white TV shows like "I Love Lucy" and "Father Knows Best," and Eisenhower as President.  And it's quite difficult for me to wrap my mind around the fact that when I was in 7th grade, the bombing of Pearl Harbor was as recent as 1999 is now. I knew that it was something my father remembered: he was at a New York Giants football game at the Polo Grounds when the announcement came over the public address system directing all servicemen to report to their units, and he knew that something bad had happened. But, again, it was ancient history to me, like everything else that happened before I became somewhat aware of the world outside my family and school. (My first distinct memory of which is probably watching my parents watch one of the JFK-Nixon debates in 1960 on a black-and-white TV.)

Edited January 30 by DonnaML

[JeandAcre]

A resounding second to all you said, Donna.  I distinctly remember World War II feeling like recent history, even though I was born most of two decades after the end of it, because there were so many veterans who were still very much alive.

...And one of the favorite favorite years of my life is still 1973 (it makes you feel old just to have to stop yourself before you say, "'73").  At my age, young enough to be watching Watergate just for the entertainment value, the convergence of cultural dynamics was fantastic.  Right, this was the golden age of Top 40 Radio.  Torrents of nostalgia summarily ensue.

[DonnaML]

6 minutes ago, JeandAcre said:

 I distinctly remember World War II feeling like recent history

To me, though, it didn't feel like that. As recent as it was, and as well as both my parents remembered it -- after all, with apologies for being graphic, close relatives of my mother were still being exterminated in gas chambers 10 years before I was born -- it seemed very long ago to me, existing in the black-and-white world that almost everything pre-1960 felt like to me.

Edited January 30 by DonnaML

[JeandAcre]

The contrast between your experience and mine couldn't have been more profound.  I didn't even have any relatives, living or dead, who'd served any more recently than World War I.  I got my childhood World War II mostly from the plethora of '60's movies and television.  (Thank you, wrong way to learn history --cf. John Wayne for the preceding century.)  The impact even of the veterans I met was effectively anecdotal.

...Nope, there's zero comparison.  Both our respective, aggregate memories are irreducibly subjective (what memories aren't, effectively by definition?), but in your case, the dimension of subjectivity only makes them more profoundly substantive --as resonantly so as mine emphatically are not.

[Dafydd]

What an interesting thread.

I remember my teacher in 1966 asking how many people had TV's. I could not put my hand up and I lived in what we would typically call a "middle class" area. That soon changed and within 5 years from myself and one other in a class of 30 admitting we didn't have a TV the question was how many people had colour TV's.

When I started work I had a secretary who typed my letters. For decades I have dealt with my own correspondence with my laptop and every laptop has replaced a person.

I once said to a board of directors that  we needed a fax machine and was laughed at with the comment that why would we need one when we bought a perfectly new Telex machine the month before? Within 18 months there was no such thing as a Telex machine in business other than in banks and the FBI.

In the 1980's I had a "mobile" phone in my car , it was the size of a suitcase, a couple of years later I had a cell phone the size of a house brick and now my cell phone is tiny and I can speak and see people 15,000 miles away. I wrote an article a while ago called "Beam me up Scottie" and I opened the article explaining how my grandfather ridiculed Captain Scott and his "communicator" saying that it was impossible because we couldn't even get a decent call to a village 20 miles away! The article was about Nomophobia and since that time when my grandfather laughed at the Star Trek communicator being fantasy, the mobile phone is possibly the one item that history will record as being the most important possession of the masses and the most influential device ever, possibly apart from the printed word, that has manipulated and influenced mankind. It addicts people with Serotonin and Dopamine releases and is addictive to many.

In reality, I guess the bulk of us have lived through the second industrial revolution and the ties of many of us to recent history are profound. My Father heard Hitler speak and appreciated he was a madman and narcissist and thankfully had the sense to join the Dutch Navy and that saved him. I was born in 1956 and played on bomb sites in the UK and our link to the past was not tenuous. In the 1970's I tape recorded World War One veterans and recorded extraordinary stories and that has perpetuated individual histories more so than the histories of the victor. I can truly appreciate @DonnaML's comments as our generation was born within a decade of the madness and it was as raw a memory to our parents as my explanation of my hippy dippy youth was to my children and grandchildren. 

I find our knowledge of the Roman and Greek civilisations extraordinary given what we know from surviving histories and numismatic study and archaeology but the invention of photography has created records of the Crimean and US Civil War that for the first time leave little to  interpretation as they are literal.

Unless we experience another major Carrington Event the historians of the future will be able to attempt to  decipher history from the most powerful media of all - the spoken word.

We all share an interest in history and that binds us and without that there would be no forum despite disparate interests in era and civilisations.

I will end my ramble on something I watched recently that was a major TV hit in the UK when I was growing up.

Sexist, non-PC , and weirdly unscientific. Apparently the producers had never heard of gravity and why didn't we notice the strings? Maybe our diet was so poor it affected our eyesight! 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 1 by Dafydd